The Aggregate Value of Land in the Greater Los Angeles Region

This paper estimates the aggregate value of land in the Greater Los Angeles Region in 2000 using the land parcel database of the Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG), which combines land registry and property tax assessment data from the constituent counties. To our knowledge, the paper is the first to estimate aggregate land value from a parcel database. Aggregate land value is of interest in several contexts: macroeconomic modeling of land and property markets, taxation of land and property, and regional and national accounting. Land parcel databases hold great promise for application in urban and regional policy analysis. Unfortunately, the assessment component of the SCAG database has severe problems with missing and erroneous data. One contribution of the paper is to alert researchers to these problems, which are likely present in other land parcel databases, and to advise them not to trust results reported for any land parcel database unless accompanied by documentation of how these problems were dealt with. We establish a lower bound on the ratio of aggregate land value to regional income of 1.114, which is higher than previous estimates, and argue that the true ratio is likely considerably higher.